My favorite moments here are the ones that are denser with samples, which probably explains why I vastly prefer Paul's Boutique. This does still hold up pretty well, and it's much more consistent than a lot of the other mid-80s hip hop albums I've heard. In fact, some of my least favorite tracks on here are a couple of the singles (most notably "Girls," which I cannot abide), and some of my favorites are either non-singles or ones that I don't think caught the same level of airplay ("Rhymin & Stealin," "Hold It Now, Hit It"). "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" is pretty undeniable. Rick Rubin's career is pretty fascinating too in that he worked so well on this and Reign in Blood, for instance, but then churned out some of the worst-sounding music of all time with Californication (among others) some 15 years later.
"Photograph" towers over the rest of this album for me, one of my favorite (perhaps my #1 favorite?) "glam metal," or whatever you want to call it, single from the 80s. What an incredible song. "Stagefright" is probably the only one of the album cuts I can truly say I liked. The last three songs especially really let this album down in the home stretch. "Rock of Ages" has a real good chorus but I'm not so into everything else. So, despite loving "Photograph," I was pretty let down by this one front-to-back unfortunately.
The first 10 or so seconds of this album has got to be up there as far as any 10-second stretches in music go. John McLaughlin's guitar tone on this album is one of my favorites of all time too, but somehow what holds everything down for me perfectly on "Shhh / Peaceful" is the perfect simplicity of Tony Williams' drums. I don't think there's a single snare hit the entire 18 minutes, just the ever-present, ever-modulating open/closed hi-hat. I don't know exactly who's responsible for the electric piano at what points, but Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Zawinul is quite the stable to pull from. This is one of my all-time favorite albums, the Miles album I've spent the most time with to this point, and it presages so much other music I love dearly, like Can's Future Days, the later-period Talk Talk albums, and some of Brian Eno's later "rock" albums like Another Green World and Before and After Science. But this one stands perfectly on its own as well.
This one's okay. The only other Bob Marley studio album I've heard in full is Exodus, which is both much more consistent and has higher highs. The whole B-side of this album kinda slid past me, but this is the first time I'm hearing it. First four tracks are all good.
The singles are good, "Waterfalls" has wonderful production, but the album cuts I think are going to take me longer to crack into. Not my favorite album in this style, but it's all pretty good. I'd give it a 3.5 if I could.
Traffic is a band I've been interested in for awhile. They don't seem to quite fit in with all the other English prog bands from around the same time, and the extent of what I know about Steve Winwood is "Higher Love." Unfortunately a lot of this falls a little too far into bluesy territory than I like my prog to go. My favorite track is probably the title track, which is basically just a folk song. I dunno. It's okay.
This is my favorite Kate Bush album, ever-so-slightly beating out Hounds of Love. I can't think of any music that sounds remotely like this album, and even if something else did sound like this, there's no way the songs would be this good. I love the chiming guitar in "Get Out of My House" and the bass throughout is so good.
